Greg Lauren Wants to Change Menswear One Distressed Jacket at a Time

The artist and designer, who shares a last name—and bloodline—with that other Lauren, is creating a ripped-and-repaired universe that looks like nothing else in American menswear right now. But how did a kid who grew up in a world of matinee-idol style wind up crafting one-of-a-kind kits better suited for the fashion apocalypse? We found out.

The day after his Fall-Winter 2016 Fashion Week presentation, Greg Lauren is feeling good. We’re walking through his temporary studio here in New York, an airy space with a coffee bar, and Lauren’s got a post-show buzz, the edges sanded down by his slightly unnerving Angeleno calm. He grew up here, on the Upper East Side—maybe you know his Uncle Ralph?—but he’s spent his adult life based in Los Angeles. He worked as an artist for a while and then, in 2011, returned to his ancestral calling: designing exceedingly handsome and terrifically expensive clothes.

Let’s be clear, though: Lauren’s clothes are more Mad Max than Polo. Military tents refashioned into coats, flannel shirts with snipped-off hems, Henleys that feel a century old—Greg Lauren garments exist somewhere between the past and the future, simultaneously beaten to death and precious to the touch. His show the previous night captured all this—little pods of models in a cavernous space, each group dressed in a different facet of the GL wardrobe: Pinstriped dandies held court next to post-apocalyptic miners, and very beautiful boxers took turns shadow-sparring in a ring erected in the center.

**GQ: The spring show felt like a big one for you. What were you trying to do with that collection? **

GREG LAUREN: I wanted to make one collection that was putting all of the archetypes that I love exploring on display, with my reinterpretation, which is really what my menswear is about. I had an amazing education in classic menswear, particularly classic American menswear. So my understanding of who a man should be and what a man should aspire to was taught to me through clothing at first. And so in order to find my own voice, I had to re-create those and in some ways tear them down, to find out what they meant to me, and then what does my version look like.

When it comes to things like suits, we have no need for a suit anymore. It is absolutely no longer about status or a symbol of one’s place in society. So it’s an opportunity to be a symbol of what today’s man is about. Which means I’m either gonna use a unique fabric, which is not meant to be used in a suit, or I’m gonna use my signature destroyed elegance, because nothing gives me more joy than to make a perfectly tailored and constructed suit out of something like a destroyed fabric.

Greg Lauren Spring-Summer 2016Getty Images

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East-West is a big thing for you, right? Whether it’s your family and your heritage in New York and you being in L.A., or you doing this in America and having interactions with Japanese fabrics or craftsmanship.

Absolutely. I am a born-and-bred New Yorker who is living and working happily in L.A. And L.A. is the most creative place on the planet right now for a creative person to find their voice. For me, that means bringing everything that’s in my background and mixing it with my life now. You know, living in L.A., it’s about being an artist, it’s about the beach, it’s

about a laid-back kind of attitude, but the New Yorker in me keeps me driven and motivated. I try to infuse the things I grew up around—and the things that might feel like they’re traditionally East Coast ideas—and give them a new, artistic West Coast spin.

Speaking of that heritage: Looking back at some old interviews, you’ve said a handful of times that, growing up, you were introduced to style icons like Cary Grant, but you felt more like Oliver Twist. Why?

The Six Million Dollar Man was one of my major heroes, because he’s symbolic of someone who’s been broken and rebuilt. Those are my heroes, those guys. But then all of a sudden, my dad might say, _Come check this out, Greg. Want to see a great movie? Want to see somebody really cool? _And it would be any one of a number of Cary Grant or Fred Astaire movies. I remember when I was 12 years old, I was going to some event and my dad said, _I love your look. It’s very Duke of Windsor. _And this was a huge compliment. I was told that if you wore these things, you were like these guys—and you should aspire to be these guys. And the irony is that so many of those guys were in fact created, or put up facades.

As I started to get older, I started to question the idea that you could be like one of your heroes if you wore what they wore. I feel like you should be inspired by your heroes, but you shouldn’t actually want to be your heroes.

But why Oliver Twist? You come from a real serious American family, and you’re saying, I feel a little bit more like a British orphan?

Well, okay. I’ll explain that. With Oliver Twist, I didn’t think of him as a British orphan. He was symbolic of Dickensian London—and so it was not only Oliver Twist but also artists selling their art in the street. There was an element of Les Miz.

And then I have an affinity to stories about the Lower East Side. My grandparents were Russian immigrants, and I find a tremendous amount of beauty and connection to these immigrants coming and landing in New York. There was something about that self-made thing that I am drawn to. Maybe because they did it one way and my father and my uncle did it another way, I felt like I needed to return to something that was closer to—I learned to _make _clothing. I learned to make clothing and understand it from the inside out, so that it no longer became this thing that you put on to hide. I know how to turn a lapel, I know how to set a sleeve. Somehow that process allowed clothing to mean something more tactile to me.

And so when I say Oliver Twist, I think what I really mean is, he’s a combination of the lost innocence and the boy who wants to say: Hey, I’m not that person. I’m not who you may think I am. I’m not part of the [Ralph Lauren] image that you might associate with me.

A little bit of a teenage rebellion as clothing design.

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Yeah. Which I didn’t do as a teenager! I was the guy with my buddies saying, like, _No, man, you should really wear _this to the prom. You know? But reflecting back, I think there was always a part of me that wanted to say, _Wait a minute. Whose heroes did I inherit? There’s nothing wrong with them, but who are my heroes? How do I feel? _And somehow within those wonderful, iconic archetypes, there was a little boy feeling a little bit lost and trying to figure out how he’s allowed to be, and who he wants to be. And so for me, that’s Oliver Twist, if that makes sense.

You describe it as pushing away from your heritage, but there’s another way to look at it, which is that you’re doing the _ne plus ultra _version of RRL [Ralph Lauren’s obsessively sourced quasi-vintage line]. Which is, like, I’m gonna dig for vintage stuff, I’m gonna make it specific and perfect and put my own twist on that.

Well, there’s a very big difference. I still have the very first collection of RRL. At the time, I felt like, _Oh, my god. I’ve gone to heaven. _This was my childhood, all those iconic pieces that I learned to love.By the age of 5, I was able to go to the Canal Street Army Navy store and pick out the best faded Army shirts and Navy jackets. But my use of vintage clothing has nothing to do with reproduction. RRL is honoring certain pieces and iconic worlds and trying to re-create them, closer to a period movie and period costume.

But you’re taking all of those ideas and making your own.

Right. And the references are completely different. I’m taking that silhouette that Cary Grant would have worn and using fabric from either World War II or Vietnam War duffel bags, so there’s this strange Edwardian–Vietnam War hybrid. Yes, guys who like RRL love my stuff and vice versa. And I think a lot of guys want something beyond RRL, and they recognize that I’m not stuck having to follow any ground rules for period pieces.

Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because I feel like time is a really interesting way to think about and look at your work. It’s like, _I don’t know if this is 1920 or if it’s 2072. _

That’s right. I grew up loving and being exposed to the beauty of vintage clothing. But using vintage fabrics is not about trying to make something look old. It’s about repurposing the image and trying to say something different about the silhouette I’m using. It just happens to then embody something we all love. It’s nostalgic, but it’s a modern silhouette. And you don’t know whether it’s in the past or the future.

When people think of apocalyptic clothing, sometimes everything looks the same. But my theory is not that we’re just gonna be wearing rags. I think that there’s a natural tendency towards dressing up—humans have been doing it forever. So for me, I enjoy the question _What if you only had certain materials? What would you do with it? _You know, I think we’d still figure out how to make it look like a jacket of mine.

2016 Randy Brooke

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I want to push on that a little. Because it’s one thing to talk about what we’ll make clothes out of in a dystopian future, and it’s another that yours are sold in some of the fanciest stores in the country. And your clothes are not cheap. So I wonder how you negotiate those two things, wanting to make stuff that is destroyed but also valuable.

The cost of something is really based on what someone’s willing to pay for it. When I set out to make clothing, I started as an artist making clothing. The pieces are really labor-intensive and time-consuming. I think they embody a message, and they’re endowed with a soul and a story.

I think people are embracing creativity. I think that creativity and uniqueness and this idea of a one-of-a-kind thing—whether it’s destroyed or handmade—is, to some people right now, more valuable than the most precious fabric. Regardless of the label, they’re recognizing that there’s an authorship behind what they’re wearing. Someone made this and there may not be another one like it, so that’s what gives it its value.

**Earlier, you were talking about wanting to free the suit from being a symbol of status, as it might have been in years past. But is there a part of you that’s anxious that right now maybe a Greg Lauren piece is, in its own way, a symbol of status? **

I absolutely recognize that, and I recognize the irony of that as well. I’m not rebelling against something, necessarily; I’m trying to understand something. Right now, specifically when it comes to clothing and identity, men are trying to figure out who they’re supposed to be, who they want to be. And I’m trying to get behind [that]—and get to who we want to be. That begins with my own confusion. I’m the first one to admit that—and I understand that it is very ironic that—as an artist interrogating and questioning something and then re-creating something, I’ve actually made something that is, uh, equally expensive.

One last question: What’s the craziest thing that you’ve ever done to distress a piece of clothing?

I don’t know if this is crazy: I drive a truck in L.A., and I absolutely have put things in the street and driven over them with my truck.

That doesn’t sound so crazy—that’s what I did to break in my baseball mitt, growing up!

Absolutely. My methods are very tried and true. There’s no shotguns involved, nothing like that. My distressing process is a little bit old-fashioned. I think distressing methods were more high-tech back in the ’70s and

’80s, when people used to put jeans in bathtubs filled with bleach. Now, Home Depot is a distresser’s best friend. A little sandpaper will go a long way.

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